Do Your Visitors See Their Perfect Reflection In Your Website?

Continued from Website Design & Being a Trusted Expert Part 1

The first thing a buyer wants to see when entering your site is something they can relate to; the site has to resonate with them.  If they can see something of themselves in the site, they will inherently trust it more.

You need to think about the site organization – you need to make sure that there are the appropriate links that relate directly to what buyers are looking for, and that follows their thought process so that it looks logical and organic to them.

Once you’ve identified the situations that your targets are finding themselves in that causes them to seek you out, and you have the starting point for how to organize you navigation.  Make your buying process follow the path of solving those problems. You then have the opportunity to communicate your expertise in solving these problems, build an empathic report with them, and move them further along to completing the buying cycle.

Who your target audience is will also influence the formats in which you talk to them. You need to think about your buyer’s preferred media and learning styles. Some groups will love to read long copy, while others prefer things short and to the point.  An older target audience might not enjoy videos or podcasts as much as a younger audience.  Whatever the personality of your target audience, your site also has to have its own distinct and memorable personality.  And you need to make sure that, once you’ve decided on what that should be, that you stay consistent with that tone throughout all of your communications.

Price point is also important when it comes to how much sales copy to use. If you are selling a low priced offer (less then $97), you do not need 30 pages of sales copy… keep it to about 4 full page scrolls max. If you are offering a free trial (Pay $1 now and then get access for 30 days), then use even less copy. Focus on the benefits and let the free trial do the selling for you. In fact (obviously depending on the target audience), for free trials, short pages with a video and few bullet points work VERY well!

As you start to get repeat visitors, they will develop an emotional and personal relationship with you.  They will expect to see and hear things in a certain way from your.  To change that voice drastically without any warning will undermine the trust you’ve built with them.  That’s not to say you shouldn’t be testing things (that’s a whole other series of posts) but you need to make sure you’re not making dramatic changes in the personality of your site without cause.

Don’t forget the importance of images and pictures in setting up the personality of your site.  They are powerful tools that, when chosen correctly, can really resonate emotionally with your audience.  When chosen incorrectly, they can be off-putting, and ruin the atmosphere that you’re trying to create. This is a good place for testing – most people focus on the hard things, like the offer, or buy-it-now buttons, but you’d be surprised at the difference an image can make in your conversion rate.

A few important things to understand about images.

• “I Am Not That Old Am I?” – People want to think they are younger then they are… so if you are relating to a target audience that is 50, have pictures that have 40 year old looking people.Use common sense here… if you are targeting a teenagers, do NOT but pictures of children (I hope you realize that is obvious).
• “Show Me How I Will Look After Your Product” – You want to show what the end result of what your offering will provide. This is why you don’t see weight loss supplements with only fat people on the page and dating sites with only lonely losers on the page. Show pictures of happy couples, six pack abs, laughter and other happy things. Obviously it depends on what your selling, if you are selling a product focused on potty training, a picture of a guy with six pack abs is not really a good choice… but a happy kid on the potty with happy parents, that there is a good one.
• “Show Me Where to Go” – Use arrows to highlight where to take action… this has proven over and over again to increase conversions. We all hate to admit it but we all want to be told what to do… we just don’t want others to know that. Make it as brain dead simple as possible to see exactly where your customer is to go on the page, and arrows work very well.

Make sure that there’s a way for visitors to provide feedback to you.  Make the ‘contact us’ information easy to find, use ‘rate this’ buttons for your products, and have either forums or comments enabled on your blog so that people can express their opinions easily.  You can get valuable information about how well your site is resonating with its intended target (or not.)

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Make sure all of the technical aspects on your site work properly – no dead links, no images that fail to load, etc.
2. Come up with a site navigation/site map that is designed and organized with your potential buyers in mind – not how you organize your company. Also on the main page that you actually are selling, try to have the navigation moved out of the “above the fold” area. Keep them focused on the offer.
3. Make as many places for a two-way conversation that you can: easy to find ‘contact us’ information, a forum, comments on your blog, customer ratings on products.
4. Make sure that the ‘soft’ elements, like graphics and images, match your buyer personas and are going to resonate with them and make them perceive you as a Trusted Expert.

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Before you implement your external communications strategy to bring customers in to your site, you need to make sure that your internal communications strategy is in order – that is, your website itself.

Cause the best PR and marketing campaign in the world won’t increase sales if your website sucks!

And how can it suck?

Oh, there are so many ways:  obvious problems like…

• broken links
• bad checkout process
• hard-to-find contact information

to the more subtle problems like…

• focusing on your products and your wants instead of your buyers
• writing in a voice that’s going to alienate your identified personas
• not having any useful information on the site to establish yourself as a thought leader
• having bad SEO so no one can find your site
• and so on and so on!

You need to fix these first so that when you do start promoting the site and driving traffic to it, you’re putting your best foot forward and presenting a strong, cohesive website that addresses the needs and wants of your potential buyers.

While this is not a design series, and I can’t teach you how to build a beautiful site (which is an art form in itself) I can help you fix the most common mistakes people make when building a website.  The tips I’ll give you are things that anyone, regardless of design and coding experience, can do to improve the effectiveness of their website.

To best leverage the power of the content that you are creating, you need to make sure that it is easy for visitors to find what they need on your site.  And you do this through smart design.

Again, concentrate on solving their problems rather than trying to sell your product. Where most people go wrong is that they base their website on their own companies internal organization structure, which makes it really easy for them to find things, but how does that help the target audience?  They don’t care about how you organize your company, they care about your problems.

Don’t forget the WIIFM? (what’s in it for me?) that drives their behavior.

To design your site properly (i.e. to get the most conversions) you need to learn as much as possible about the buying process for your product.  You need to know how people find your site, and the length of time in a typical buying cycle (i.e. small purchases, short buying cycle, medium purchases, longer buying cycle, large purchases such as cars or homes – much longer buying cycle.) and you need to focus on walking the potential buyer through micro commitments…

Do NOT try to get them to be committed to buying from you to soon!

More to come about exactly how to do that in Part 2…

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! – Copyright JohnCow.com – All Rights Reserved